Burying the Truth at Morton Thiokol

Published: May 13, 1986

The maker of the space shuttle's flawed booster rockets, Morton Thiokol, has a crippling management problem: its management.

First, it built a rocket whose sections are sealed with a Heath Robinson design that kept eroding in flight. Instead of redesigning these O ring seals, the company petitioned a heedless, complaisant NASA to declare the seals a nonproblem, as if bureaucratic manipulation could suspend laws of physics.

Then, on the eve of the disastrous Challenger launch last January, two company engineers argued urgently against proceeding because the unusual cold would have degraded the seals even more. Morton Thiokol's management overruled them, and the Challenger was lost with all its crew.

When the engineers, Allan McDonald and Roger Boisjoly, appeared in February before the Presidential commission investigating the Challenger disaster, their articulate and thoughtful testimony was a credit to their company. Even though they made clear they had been overruled, the hearing also brought out the pressure that NASA had applied to Morton Thiokol. What a welcome contrast, people recalled in the wake of Chernobyl, with the secretive propaganda emanating from the Soviet Union.

The company's management couldn't see when it was ahead. It understood only that its bad decision had been exposed by its own employees. They had, instead of lying or dissembling before the commission, told the truth, an offense Morton Thiokol was not prepared to forgive. The management couldn't even wait until the Presidential commission had disbanded. It promptly punished the two engineers by transferring them to jobs they consider menial.

Fortunately the commission formed to root out the truth about the shuttle disaster is still in business and able to raise a shout of protest at the Morton Thiokol management. The chairman, William Rogers, said he wanted to tell ''the company as a whole'' of his distress that the engineers had been punished for testifying. That's distress the American public is wholly entitled to share.

What makes a company think it can always manipulate reality its own way, crushing dissent? Lack of market discipline is one reason. If Morton Thiokol had to compete for contracts, truth would have many voices. But NASA, like the Pentagon, runs a procurement system which suppresses competition in favor of sole source contracts. Official whims replace market judgments.

In such an atmosphere, truth can be made unwelcome and accountability diffused to the vanishing point. Look at whom NASA and Morton Thiokol hold responsible for the loss of the Challenger: so far, no one.

Responsibility need not mean blame; indeed, Morton Thiokol originally seemed to deserve respect for its willingness to confront error. But that was illusory and Mr. Rogers and his commission deserve praise for trying to make Morton Thiokol's management, and NASA, confront reality.